Cinelerra was first released August 1, 2002, and was based in part on Broadcast 2000, which was withdrawn by Heroine Virtual in September 2001.[1][better source needed] Cinelerra became the first 64-Bit media production application when it was re-written to conform to the AMD Opteron in June 2003 and was presented at SIGGRAPH 2004 in San Diego. This version was subsequently released by Adam Williams of Heroine Warrior, the principal developer of Cinelerra.

Cinelerra has a wide range of features[2] including support for high-fidelity audio and video: it processes audio using 64 bits of precision, and can work in both RGBA and YUVAcolor spaces, using floating-point and 16-bit integer representations, respectively. It is resolution and frame rate-independent, meaning that it can support video of any speed and size.

The timeline, which gives the user a time-based view of all video and audio tracks in the project, as well as keyframe data for e.g. camera movement, effects, or opacity;

the viewer, which gives the user a method of "scrubbing" (manually moving the playhead forwards or backwards to locate a specific cue or word) through footage;

the resource window, which presents the user with a view of all audio and video resources in the project, as well as available audio and video effects and transitions; and

the compositor, which presents the user with a view of the final project as it would look when rendered. The compositor is interactive in that it allows the user to adjust the positions of video objects; it also updates in response to user input.

Cinelerra has gained ground among some Linux enthusiasts looking for a native video editing system. Professional use is mostly promoted by Linux Media Arts, which sells an integrated hardware and software package for video production that includes Cinelerra.

At the National Association of Broadcasters' 2004 Electronic Media Show, Cinelerra received Bob Turner's "Making the Cut" award, given to "the best and most exciting post-production products seen at the convention".[3]

The project is following commercial interests, aiming at offering professional support to its users. It's organized to merge all existing Cinelerra projects while also providing additional fixes and enhancements. Since early 2015, Cinelerra has had an open Git repository on Google Code for analysis and for input. The goal of Cinelerra.Org remains to develop a more professional value to the product as of 2016.

One of the developers of Cinelerra 5.0 left Cinelerra.Org in 2016, continuing to work on the program with help from the Cinelerra-CV team.[4]

With the appearance of Cinelerra.Org in February 2014 it was unclear if Adam Williams was continuing to work on Cinelerra through Heroine Virtual or if development would continue in Cinelerra.Org. Due to no communication by Williams, this was only resolved months later, when in December 2015, Cinelerra 4.6.1 was released.[5]

To distinguish between all different variants of the software, the releases made by Heroine Virtual are also called Cinelerra-HV. [6]

Heroine Virtual generates a new release of Cinelerra semi-annually, available as source code only. Any bugs and usability issues found and resolved by the community that are submitted to Heroine Virtual often result in no immediate response, and it is not until a new release that there is any indication that Heroine Virtual has incorporated these changes. Because of both the latency in development and the distribution-specific nature of the release, a group of free and open-source software developers created their own version of Cinelerra referred to as Cinelerra-CV (where CV stands for community version).

Cinelerra-CV allows the community to contribute to an open repository where changes to the code are accessible to everyone. Mailing lists and an IRC channel exist where more experienced users and developers can provide support to less experienced users, and developers can hold technical discussions. Cinelerra-CV is also packaged for a wider range of distributions. It also has a different compilation system: system libraries are used extensively, and the autoconf/automake tools are used to configure the compilation system.

Although Cinelerra-CV may technically be called a fork, the relationship between Heroine Virtual and Cinelerra-CV is rather friendly. Heroine Virtual at times contributes to discussions on the mailing lists, and incorporates many of the changes made in the repository. Heroine Virtual posted the following message on their website describing the relationship:

“

What you'll find here is the heroinewarrior version of Cinelerra. This is the version that supports what we need to do at Heroine Virtual Ltd. and is the same tree that was started in 1997. As time passes and new students come and go from the GNU/Linux scene, new forks of Cinelerra emerge that are more suited to the community but not what Heroine Virtual Ltd. needs. Today you'll probably find the cinelerra-cv.org fork more useful.

They allow certain parts of our fork into their fork while contributing anything they want while we allow certain parts of their fork into our fork while contributing anything we want".[7]

”

Up until Cinelerra 2.1 the versioning of Cinelerra-CV followed that of Heroine Virtual. After Heroine Virtual produced a release, Cinelerra-CV examined the changes introduced by the new version and merged them into their version. CV was appended to the end of the version number to indicate the community version. (For example, after the 2.1 merger the CV version was labeled 2.1CV.) Starting with release 2.2, Cinelerra-CV uses its own versioning scheme, but still merges code from Cinelerra-HV. [8]

In the beginning of April 2008, the Cinelerra community announced a complete rewrite of the current community version, named as Lumiera. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but soon was separated into an independent project with its own name. Lumiera has been in the pre-alpha stage for over, but is under active development, although nothing significant has ever been released.[9] There is a binary Debian build of the development preview available.[10]

Lumiera does not use Guicast, the GUI widget library used by Cinelerra. Lumiera’s native interface will be written in GTK+, although other interfaces will be possible. Basically the GUI is a plug-in.

"Updated the x264 compressor library. Improved the mp3 decoding. Video scaling is now either nearest neighbor or bicubic, but never linear. Proxy editing got a start before discovering modern PCs can easily decode 4k."[7]

Cinelerra.Org releases a studio centric version of Cinelerra titled 5.0. Cinelerra is now fully integrated with FFMPEG and support for numerous 4K and 2K uncompressed cinema standards from such camera manufacturers as AJA, Blackmagic Design, and Red.

"Speed curves mainly for video & in degraded quality for audio. Some control over whether automation follows edits. Ability to transfer keyframes between audio and video tracks. Motion temporaries are stored in /tmp/m and /tmp/r files. Time Avg clears the accumulator on keyframes."[7]

4.4

July 9, 2012

From the Heroine Virtual website's NEWS section:

Faster startup and responsiveness, audio oscilloscope, new bright theme, and also 3 way colour correction."[7]

"Text to movie". Allows one to turn a script into an instant movie with live updating and seeking.[7]

4.2

October 15, 2010

From the Heroine Virtual website's NEWS section:

"Mainly a bugfix & personal need release. `Edit->Align edits` feature, which aligns all the audio edits with the video. Keyframe spanning feature, where highlighting a region with keyframe generation on causes effect tweeks to span all the keyframes. All assets are now opened in subprocesses so they don't bring down the entire program when they crash. Cannot drag and drop edit clips anymore, feature removed here and future versions."[7]

4.1

September 24, 2009

From the Heroine Virtual website's NEWS section:

"Main feature is nested sequences. The Viewer window does not display video clips, Bug fixed in next version at the expense of another feature removed."[7]

4.0

August 8, 2008

Since all versions 2.0 onward 10bit (useful for prof. Cinepaint) and 16bit RGB(A),YUV(A) have been removed and replaced with RGB YUV Float instead.

2.1

September 7, 2006

Merge with community SVN version. (The first use of git and a multi-person merge)

Merged with community CVS version. Special enhancements were added to this version E.g. H264 Kod. Cineon used at NAB under Fedora 1,2 and BSD 5, this could handle 4k film 4096x4096 if graphics card permits. Fast frame rate in excess of 210 frames per second at 720x480 29.97, while bringing in live HD video in the timeline from a video camera. video4linux driver Zoran chip.

1.2.1

August 8, 2004

From the Heroine Virtual website's NEWS section:

"Quicktime 2.0.4 updated. Enter the world of floating point imaging in this release. It's not just a more accurate colorspace, it's a totally new way of thinking about color. Finally, Cinelerra is officially more stable in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode."[7]

1.2.0

May 11, 2004

From the Heroine Virtual website's NEWS section:

"Cinelerra has a massive number of small changes. Quicktime finally decodes Sorenson and compressed headers."[7]

1.1.9

February 17, 2004

Merge with community CVS version.

1.1.9

February 11, 2004

From the Heroine Virtual website's NEWS section:

"This is a landmark since it's probably the first time more code was submitted from the community than internally."[7]

1.1.7

October 5, 2003

Merge with community CVS version.

1.1.7

August 11, 2003

N/A

1.1.6

May 12, 2003

N/A

1.1.5

April 29, 2003

Code "forked" into a community CVS version.

1.1.0

August 1, 2002

Initial release.

1.0.0

June 15, 2000

Founding of the Cinelerra project. After numerous discussions between Adam Williams and Michael Collins about the direction of Non-Linear Editing on Linux, Williams presented the name and concept of Cinelerra to Business Partner Michael Collins in Sunnyvale, California.